What is jQuery?

jQuery is a JavaScript library that is fast, lightweight, and can do programing interactions you would normally use JavaScript for. jQuery is almost a simpified version of JavaScript, it takes common elements from JavaScript and does them with fewer lines of code.

jQuery hasn’t been around very long, it was release in January 2006, but has continually grown to become the most used JavaScript library used on today’s websites. This has been useful for coders doing mobile development and responsive design. The strongest element about jQuery is how compatible across all internet browsers, not required on version, release or operating system.

Why Use jQuery?

The best features for jQuery is the what you can accomplish with less code than what it would take with JavaScript. The less code you need to write, the more time you save, the less the file size is, and easier to maintain and update.

The most common jQuery effects are hide and show, drag and drop, animations and form validation. By combining it with Ajax, another group of technologies to make our lives easier, you can make requests, updates and other queries to different types of databases

The Potential

The greatest potential of jQuery is that it has hundreds of possibilities it already has, Then take those possibilities you can combine them with the previous possibilities to get more possiblities. Get the picture? You can dynamically change any element on your webpage dynamicly without any type of page refresh. You have probably seen a lot of these interactions and may not have noticed.

Here let me show you:

Common Features

Supports All Versions of HTML & CSS

Supports Events and Utilities

Works with Ajax Database Requests

Creates Interaction, Effects and Animations

Works in all Popular Internet Browsers

Supported by Mobile Browsers

Small File Size

Can combine with Prototype

Can work with Other Coding Languages

Where To Get It

jQuery is an open source library that you can download and start coding in a matter of minutes. The best place to download it from is their official site jQuery.com. By downloading it from here you know that you have the latest version.

There are two file versions to download, the compressed version or uncompressed. They compress the main library file down to save size, which increase download speed. This is the version you probably want as there is no need to "hack" the main file.

There is also a CDN option. This is where you pull the latest file version from their website. This way you know you always have the latest version and never need to worry about updating.

Take note: pulling a new version could also cause your code to break as objects, methods and function can change. This could cause your custom code to react differently.

Tutorials & Resources

Because of the high demand of jQuery there are hundreds of useful resources and tutorials available across the internet. A quick Google search or YouTube playlist and you will be over your head in information.

I have compiled a small list of some quick and easy resources for those you just need a place to start.

Just the Beginning

jQuery is a new technology and is just the beginning. Developers have already taken this coding language to great heights and it will continue to improve on it. This is a coding language that would be worth sitting down and learning. If you have a strong understanding of JavaScript, jQuery will be easy to get a hold of.

More importantly a reason to learn it is for the growth of mobile development. As mobile continues to grow, there will be more of a demand for front end coders to know jQuery. As the time of this writing, most web development job opportunities will expect you to know jQuery.